Although a stranger, Marcelleus Anunobi had already met many of Hassan Abdirahman's neighbors and seemed trustworthy by the time he arrived at the Somali refugee's Wurzbach Road apartment one afternoon several years ago.
“He said, ‘I am the doctor and I have a pharmacy. I'm going to help you,'” Abdirahman recalled through a translator. “He said, ‘I will give you some medicine for your children.'”
But, Abdirahman said, after he let the pharmacist copy information from his three children's Medicaid cards, he didn't see him again — until Wednesday, when he identified Anunobi in court.
Anunobi could face up to life in prison if jurors find him guilty of Medicaid fraud at a trial this week. A dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria who opened Advanced Doctor's Prescribed Pharmacy on Medical Drive in 2007, he has been accused of billing the government for up to $2.5 million in false prescriptions.
Among those whose Medicaid numbers he used for the fake prescriptions are 20 families who moved to San Antonio from a Somali refugee camp in 2004, authorities have alleged.
Prosecutors presented Abdirahman — one of three men from the group who testified Wednesday afternoon — with a 10-page list of medications for which they said Anunobi billed the government on behalf of his children. Abdirahman said his family never requested or received any of the drugs.
“If I knew this could happen, I'd never give him my Medicaid (information),” he said.
Defense attorneys Alex Scharff and Alan Brown have said their client was unfairly singled out by the government for what amounted to innocent mistakes by an overwhelmed small businessman. They pointed out Wednesday that Abdirahman, like the other witnesses, had no formal education and could not read or write.
“Isn't it true that what really happened was the government agents showed up and you wanted to make them happy, so you signed whatever they put in front of you?” Scharff asked the witness.
But Abdirahman was adamant that he has never been to the defendant's pharmacy or received prescriptions there. That's why he signed the 10-page drug list, even if he couldn't read it, he said.
Also testifying Wednesday was Health and Human Services Commission employee Sharon Gaskill, who reviewed a list of drugs that had been billed to Medicaid on behalf of 15 young children.
One 5-year-old was listed as receiving four tubes of a steroid cream considered unsafe for children and 24 inhalers that would have amounted to four times the recommended dosage per day, she said. A newborn was listed as receiving 46 orders of antibiotics in less than seven months and enough eye drops to treat 22 eye infections, she said.
Source: mysanantonio.com
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